So I was eating these new-ish Blazin’ Buffalo and Ranch Doritos and reading this old thread. It made me start to wonder, just how popular are spicy dishes among the dopers? And if you do like eating or trying spicy meals, at what level of hotness do you take it?
I love spicy foods myself. I’m a huge wing lover, although I’m also very picky about them. I’ve tried many brands and, for some reason, they just don’t seem hot to me, even if the place offers something along the lines of a “suicide” sauce.
Not that I still don’t eat them.
And among other foods, I always enjoyed a really strong kick of spice. I’m one of the guys who actually used the packets of crushed peppers they give you with your pizza and put it on as I’m consuming.
So to answer my own questions, yeah, I love spicy foods and, to me, the hotter, the better.
I hope I’m not alone. I don’t think I am.
What level of hotness do you enjoy in your spicy dishes? Or don’t you at all?
I love spicy, but it cannot just be hot - there has to be a complexity of flavor accompanying it. I get this salsa verde at my local Mexican hole in the wall that makes my nose run, but it’s so damn tasty I think I could drink it. Sometimes I put a dollop of the electric orange habanero stuff on top of the green when I’m feeling sassy, but not often.
I always get disappointed at the Thai restaurants around here though. They ask how spicy on a scale of 1-10 and I get something really mild. I suppose I should break down and learn to make my own damn curry.
Love spicy food. I usually order 2 levels lower than the hottest, until I’ve eaten there a couple of times, and ‘calibrated’ the chef. Garlic-hot is to die for. On the home front, I limit my pepper sauces to chipotle (my fav) and habanero. Keep Tabasco on hand for eggs. I have one bottle of “stupid hot” sauce, but that’s a different thread… http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=7869573#post7869573
I don’t think it’s possible to grow a pepper too hot for me to eat it with other foods. I love the stuff! But then again, I’m from New Mexico, and it’s hard to order a meal -without- green chile.
Depends on the type of hot. Mexican food, as long as it’s combined with flavor, as hot as possible is ok with me about half the time. A new place I’ll order milder so I can see if they’re hiding poor quality with heat. I have made green chile that was too hot (my hands cracked and bled from the over abundance of habaneros), chemical-weapon hot doesn’t interest me. Don Quixote’s on Federal used to make a green chile that’d make me sweat… Ambrosia!
Mexican - 9
Buffalo-style wings, hot but not extra hot - 7
SE Asian cuisine - medium (one little pepper on the menu is enough) - 5
hot is good, when it’s with the right dish. I don’t find extra-hot junk food to be appealing, but an ultra hot ‘native thai’ heat beef dish with sticky rice is lovely!
I discovered chili peppers late in life (growing up, the family wouldn’t use anything stronger than salt for seasoning in the house, and anything Mexican, Indian or Thai would have been too ethnic and primitive). I haven’t been able to make a dish that’s too hot for me, although no one else can stand what I cook.
My chili recipe starts, “chop up one large habañero, one serrano, one jalapeño chili pepper, some finger hots and whatever else is lying around, add some powered chili (hot), some garlic, cayenne, more chili powder…”
Oh, almost forgot. I have been able to get a handful of tiny Thai peppers at a farmer’s market in the summer, then freeze a bag. They are so small they can be chopped up when frozen and popped into whatever’s cooking. One pepper adds just the right spice for a gallon of chicken soup and half of one makes for a pretty spicy omlet.
second dr mercotan, who wants hot pork rinds? or any pork rinds in point of fact.
anyhoo, let me put it this way, awhile back, me and the bud, we;re both middle aged caucasions, are at our favorite hole in the wall thai place when the hispanic girl behind the counter says how spicy, my buddy looks at me and says moderate for him, so I told her one spicy and one white boy. she goes off into gales of laughter while i’m working out the script for a new comic, the adventures of spicy and white boy, hey we could have this running sidebar of restaurant scenes…
I prefer flavorful over “hot”, if that makes any sense. I like Indian and Mexican food, but I stay away from dishes tagged as “spicy” at Chinese restaurants. Usually they’re too spicy for me.
Most of the food I eat is pretty bland. My favorite condiments are salt and black pepper. I only use mild taco sauce, and I use hot sauce sparingly, only on certain foods (like chicken noodles and hamburger helper).
I am from Louisiana and I love hot food. I can drink Tabasco on demand which may not seem that impressive to some but some people here in Massachusetts are pretty impressed. I can eat any of the common peppers and I have jalapenos on something almost daily/ I can eat the hottest Thai dishes they offer.
I don’t like heat one-upmanship however. I have some Mad Dog Inferno hot sauce in the fridge that someone recommended as a joke. It is about 250,000 Scoville units and basically painful and inedible (Tabasco is less than 5000 for example) at least to me and anyone I know. They have hot sauces that are over 1,000,000 Scoville units and beyond which I just find stupid.
I do have to be careful with my spicy food intake these days. I need to be sure I’ve gotten some decent exercise earlier that day to ensure proper metabolism and speedy gastric emptying after the meal. Otherwise those 2 AM capsaicin burps are killers. It’s a burn that no amount of antacid will diminish, and can only be quelled by drinking some diluted lidocaine.
And even the lidocaine doesn’t help if the peppers refluxed up above my soft palate and into the ol’ nasal passages. At least not until I snort the lidocaine up my nose.
It’s worth the risk, though. For decently hot cuisine (mexican, tex-mex, thai, szechuan, korean, indian) that is. Not hot junk food.
I like a little spicy but not too much. I can handle it pretty hot, though, much more so than even my wife, and she’s Thai. The Thais generally don’t believe that Westerners CAN eat spicy, so if when ordering something spicy in a restaurant, I end up having to assure them that yes, I really DO want it spicy and can handle it. It’s then not uncommon for them to make it WAY over the top just to see if I can handle THAT, as well as to provide an evening’s entertainment gaging with tears running down my cheeks.
The food for which I have the inclination towards the most outrageous forms of hot? Egg on a roll with bacon and cheddar cheese. I get one for breakfast about 4 days a week.
I daub mine up pretty liberally with blobs of this.
Years ago, I ate the hottest of foods. One time, some friends of my ex wife made wings and when I came home, they gave me some and called for water. They looked at me smiling, expecting me to guzzle the water. Their faces fell when I didn’t.
However, I’ve been married and divorced twice and each of my ex’s hated spicy foods so my tolerence went down.
Now that I’m single again, I’m building up my tolerance again. I made some jambalya for my parents and brother and I used two drops of Dave’s Inanity Sauce in mine. Neither my brother or dad could stand one.
